


Whose Frail Warmth

by cofax, mn_x



Series: Life During Wartime [9]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: AU, Apocafic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 08:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mn_x/pseuds/mn_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I imagine the earth when I am no more." Mulder and Scully and Maggie discover there is more to the Project than they had ever imagined. Follows immediately after "Getting Used to Gunfire".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whose Frail Warmth

**Author's Note:**

> A note on timing: the Life During Wartime series diverts from canon just before Biogenesis. Other notes at end.

November 27

 

It was after sunset, but it was still light enough for Mulder to avoid the downed wood and most of the briars. Tugging his boot from a tenacious vine, he stepped out into the carefully-chosen clearing and looked around for his partner.

Scully was where he had left her two hours ago, sitting cross-legged on the ground in the middle of the clearing. In the gloomy light, she was tiny, blurred by grief and exhaustion and the growing shadows about them. He wanted to leave her alone; he wanted to leave this place. He couldn't do both.

He shifted his weight, and saw her straighten in reaction to the faint rustle of his jacket.

"Is it time?" she asked, before he could form the words to reach her. 

"Yeah." His hands ached to erase the past month from her face, from her memory. He jammed his fists into his pockets instead. "It's getting dark, and we're not that far away now. Maybe tomorrow or the next day, if there aren't any more roadblocks." He stopped. There was more he could say, but why bother? Nothing he said could make any difference.

She nodded, but did not move for a moment.

He'd thought it was nearly over; he'd thought they were safe.

She straightened her legs, hissing with the effort, but shook her head at his offered hand as she climbed to her feet. Scully's hands were probably filthy but she ran them over her face anyway. After a short hesitation, she touched the cross at her collar, then reached behind her neck.

Mulder couldn't help himself -- he stopped her with a hand on her elbow. "No, Scully. You need it."

She drew a shaky breath, but didn't look up. Her voice was soft and empty of emotion. "I guess."

Then she stepped around him and walked out of the clearing, leaving him alone beside a patch of disturbed ground, approximately seven feet by three.

**~+~+~**

October 30

It was in many ways like road trips she had taken as a child, when her father would load all the kids into the station wagon for visits to lavender-scented great aunts in New York City or Chicago. The same dim scenery flowing by, the same warmth of too many sleepy bodies in one place. Word games and broken graham crackers, and singing her father's favorite pop songs from his youth. 

The illusion was broken, however, by the string of twisted, tumbled freight cars that suddenly shaped itself out of the darkness. Scully wrenched the wheel of the truck to the side, braking hard, and brought the big vehicle to a shuddering halt twenty yards from the train. She swore viciously to herself. 

Her heart was racing, and she dropped her head against the steering wheel, waiting for it to slow down. Mulder had stirred, rocked against the glass, then sunk back to sleep, slumped against the passenger-side window. His leather jacket was bundled up for a pillow, the zipper pressing into his face.

Her mother wasn't asleep -- hadn't been for some time. Scully felt Maggie's eyes on her and resisted the urge to look back. Since they had run from DC, Scully had managed to avoid speaking much to her mother. But then it had been years since she had been able to meet her mother's eyes freely. 

She was trapped now; she couldn't avoid her mother forever. 

"Dana?"

"Yeah, Mom?"

"When were you planning to tell me about this?" 

"About what?"

"Don't treat me like an idiot, Dana." Her mother's voice took on a sudden sharpness. "About what happened to you back there, in Kentucky. When -- by the roadblock where they shot that man." 

Even Mom has a hard time saying "when the aliens came," Scully thought, and wondered if it were genetic.

"Well?" Maggie was getting impatient and Scully shook herself back into the conversation.

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to explain to me what's going on! I want to know what happened to you back there, and what Fox knew about it, and whether it's happened before!"

"Mulder, Mom. He asked you to call him Mulder."

"Fine."

Scully kept her eyes focused out the window, her hands clenched on the steering wheel. If Mulder heard this he would know she'd been hiding things from him. "It's happened twice before."

"And?"

"The first time --- do you remember, a year or so ago, when all those people burned to death on a bridge in Pennsylvania? The news said it was suicide."

"Ye-es." The syllable was drawn out, waiting for the catch.

"I was there. I escaped, but I don't remember anything about it." She swallowed, forced away the memory of her voice, thinned by the tape recorder. 

"And the second time?"

Scully glanced sideways at Mulder: he looked like he was still asleep. She dropped her voice lower anyway.

"Six months ago. I -- I felt it start. I was at the grocery store, and I locked my keys in the car so I wouldn't be able to drive. When, when I woke up, I was miles away, walking west on a highway on-ramp. I never found out what happened."

"How? How does this happen? Why you?" 

"It's the chip, we think. The one I put in my neck just before I went into remission." It was the first time she'd said it aloud, that her salvation was also her direst threat.

There was a long silence. She knew what was coming.

"How *dare* you. How *dare* you not tell me about this." Maggie's voice was low and venomous. 

"And what would you have done, Mom?"

"I don't know! But you should have told me!" 

"So you could tell Bill and Tara I think I'm going to be abducted by aliens? No, Mom." This was easier than she expected.

Maggie pulled her head back. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that when I told you I was infertile after my cancer, you lost no time in announcing that fact to the rest of the family." She wondered if her mother had told Charlie too.

"But Dana -- "

"No, Mom. You had no right to tell them. I don't need pity -- yours or theirs." 

"It's not pity, Dana. We're your family. We care."

"I don't want--" Scully paused, considered her words more carefully. "Nothing you could say would change my decisions about my life, Mom. And I didn't want any of you to worry about me." Not Bill, whose worry was partly for her safety and partly for his own reputation. Not even Charlie, who apparently understood far more about her life than even her mother did.

Another silence. Scully put the truck into reverse. Dawn was breaking, silhouetting Mulder in a spray of greens and yellows. They were going to have to backtrack around the train wreck. 

"Dana."

"Yeah?"

"You don't get to decide who cares about you. And nothing you can say or do will *ever* stop us from worrying."

**~+~+~**

November 1

It was quiet in the motel room, without the sound of the truck's engine or of the women's breathing. The silence pressed down on him, keeping him flat on his back on the bed, staring up at the bumpy, uneven ceiling. He flexed his hands experimentally and winced at their soreness. His shoulders and neck were sore too, from tension, from sitting in the same position in the truck for far too long, from grief at what awaited them outside the truck. 

The bodies yesterday had seemed at first like more pieces of scattered, twisted, torn metal, part of the wrecked plane. Only up close had they suddenly been made of a softer material. 

He could hear the movements of the two women in the room next door, occasionally the low murmur of voices. Scully, mostly, chivvying Maggie to eat. Maggie had gone silent after they had left the wreckage of the small plane; Scully had gotten angry and sharp, swearing viciously at fallen branches and stopped cars that had blocked the road. She had driven the truck away from the crash site, hands clenched and white around the steering wheel. They had driven for seven hours despite their fatigue, as if fleeing monsters or ghouls instead of bodies, masses of bone and blood and sinew. 

They had stopped near dawn at a small motel. Motels were good; no one noticed one more car in the parking lot. He might wish that more of them had back exits, but at least they could flee to separate rooms. They had stayed in the truck for a long time after Scully had turned the ignition off. His face pressed against the coolness of the glass, Mulder had not wanted to move. 

"I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep," Maggie had said, her voice sounding dreamy, half-delirious. It was the first time she'd spoken since they'd gotten in the truck again. "They aren't the only ones this happened to, are they? When the--the--"

"Electromagnetic pulse," Scully had filled in, voice detached, as if naming the phenomenon would give her power over it.

"When it happened, this happened all over, didn't it?" Maggie had demanded.

It was the silence after Maggie's question that had finally driven Mulder out of the truck. It had taken all his will, his muscles feeling pummeled, to pull a sleeping bag out of the back of the truck and move to the hotel room, and he had collapsed on the sagging bed and stayed there. He wanted to sleep, but his mind wouldn't let him. This had only been a small plane, probably a weekend flier taking his family out -- God knew how many people were scattered over the country, unburied and unmourned. 

Three bodies, they'd thought, although it had been hard to tell. Scully had told her mother to stay back while she and Mulder inspected the wreckage that had half-blocked the road they were on. The smell as they had gotten closer had been -- he almost gagged again at the remembrance, and turned on his side in the bed, forcing his breath into a deeper, steadier rhythm. 

"Would you stop swearing?" he heard Maggie say in the next room, loudly. "It's not . . . *stop* it." Mulder closed his eyes and pressed his head against the pillow. Scully's voice was lower but clear and furious, asking her mother why her swearing, of all the things they had to be concerned about . . . 

He stretched out one hand, pulling his knapsack to his side and fumbling through it without looking. He didn't want to hear their anger, didn't want to feel his own despair. He felt the smooth plastic of the Walkman, and grabbed a tape at random. "*This* you can do something about," Maggie was shouting. 

Headphones on. Volume up. The Play button made a small click as he pressed it. And then . . . his mouth curved up bitterly. Of course he'd picked this tape, what else?

He squeezed his eyes shut against the sound. He knew every note of the Brandenburg Concertos inside and out from his repeated playings of this tape after Arecibo, lying on his couch in the dark and replaying the moment when he had let his useless gun fall from his hand. Let the gun fall in Arecibo, and gone home to sulk and to let himself be distracted by flukemen and Augustus Cole. 

He had always let himself be distracted, even though he, of all people, knew that this day might come. And so here he was, on the run in a hastily packed truck, having done nothing to prevent this, with one woman whom he had never been able to protect and another woman who was . . . a mother. Not his mother, and he could easily come to resent her for that.

"Shouldn't we bury them?" Maggie had asked when he and Scully returned to the truck.

"We can't," he had replied flatly, moving to get into the truck.

"But we have that shovel, we can't just leave--"

"Mom," Scully had said, her voice raw and grating. "We *can't.* The damage that was--there's not enough to--we *can't.* And he had turned away from the slow dawn of comprehension on Maggie's face, from her fumbling insistence that they should at least say a prayer. Her short, hesitant prayer had seemed to drain the words from her.

Now, he lay in the motel room and listened to the precise, fluid music. And God, despite everything, it was beautiful, the interweaving of melody and counterpoint. 

The touch on his shoulder made him flail, startled out of half-sleep. Cool hands caught his wrist. Scully.

He reached up with his free hand, pushed the headphones back. "Sorry, I'm sorry, Mulder," Scully was saying.

"S'okay," he said. "Just startled."

"I wanted to make sure you ate before you fell asleep," she said. 

"I . . . yeah, I will."

"Okay." Her thumb was cool against his wrist, monitoring his slowing pulse.

They sat in silence for a minute or two, and he let his eyes close again, let himself lie back on the bed.

"It's--" he cleared his throat. "When I was a kid, I hated going to the dentist's. But I'd keep telling myself, no matter how bad it was, it'd be over in an hour. Or the school year, summer would come. Even with Kersh, I set a limit for myself. If we were still shoveling through shit a year later, I'd be gone. You measure something out, you can stand it. But when does this end?"

"In another few weeks, we'll be at the rendezvous point," she said. "This won't last forever."

"I'm not talking about the trip."

"I know."

"Why aren't they here yet, Scully?" he asked. "They've effectively destroyed our country's government, our possibility of resistance. What are they waiting for?"

Her weight shifted on the bed. Her lips thinned, and he almost let out a crack of laughter. After all this, after all--she still didn't want to believe, even now. 

Of course, he didn't want to believe either, not anymore. "Maybe there was some miscommunication," he said, spinning out theories as he had a million times, hoping for a response. "Maybe the rebels have been stopping them. Or maybe they'll come when things have reached their worst point, and present themselves as saviors."

"Like Cassandra Spender thought they were," she said softly. He thought about the craft that had hovered over them, about the way that it had tried to pull Scully away from him. No, they could not be saviors. He twisted to his side, curling his knees a little so that she was sitting in the arc formed by his body.

"Mulder--come on and get something to eat."

What he wanted to do was stay here, her warmth comforting him. He opened his eyes; her hand was pale and clean against his.

"Scully." he said. "Scully--" Scully, stay here and sing me a lullaby, chase away death for a while. Let me forget that the woman in the next room isn't *my* mother.

"Yeah, Mulder?" She was looking at him with worry in her eyes, and compassion, and bone-deep fatigue. 

"You guys already eat?" he finally asked.

**~+~+~**

November 3

Her mother's head was heavy against Scully's shoulder, and Mulder's voice a soft monotone to her left. Between them, Scully felt oddly secure.

Mulder's voice kept her tethered to wakefulness, but barely. He had been rambling for the last hour or so, a long and involved story about an early job as a busboy at a seafood restaurant. Part of her monitored his voice, not for words but for signs of stress or sorrow that would tell her that he had shifted subjects and needed more of a response than her occasional murmur of agreement. 

She was glad that he was talking, at least -- a silent Mulder worried her, and she had no energy for worry. But they had not come across any more wreckage in the last three days, and he was starting to lose the look of soul-deep exhaustion around his eyes. He was still tired, of course, from three more days of driving through the night, but he didn't look quite so defeated. He had always had a gift for resilience. 

A squeal of brakes, and the truck stopped, her mother's head bouncing against her shoulder. Mulder was saying, "*hey,*" and she only realized that she was slumping against his side when that support was gone. The draft of cold air woke her as Mulder opened the door and jumped out of the truck.

His second "hey" was from farther away, loud and startled, and she was sliding across the seat, fingers scrabbling for the gun at her back in reflex even before her feet had touched the ground. She processed her surroundings automatically: empty road, scattered trees, what looked like a farmhouse in the distance.

"Keep away," another voice said, female and sharp and high. "I'm not carrying any drugs on me. I don't have anything you would need." A woman was standing in the road, caught in the headlights.

"Listen, I'm not trying to hurt you, I wanted to make sure you were all *right*, that's all," Mulder was saying, slow and calm, but she could hear the frantic edge to his voice. His hands were raised, palms out, defense against the shotgun that was pointed at him. 

"Put down your gun," Scully said, and it came out as a growl.

"Don't move any closer," the woman said. "Don't *any* of you move any closer. And put down your guns." She didn't look dangerous, an older woman with tousled hair, eyes squinted against the truck headlights--but she held the gun steady.

"We don't mean you any harm," Mulder said, but the woman's attention had shifted away from him, to Scully, and then to Scully's right. In her peripheral vision, Scully saw that her mother was holding her father's old shotgun awkwardly, pointed towards the stranger. "We're just passing through, trying to get in touch with some friends. We aren't trying to rob you or . . . anything."

"Then get your guns off me."

Scully let her gun lower a bit, saying, "We don't mean any harm. We're not going to hurt you. Just don't hurt him."

"I just stopped because I was worried--I didn't even see you until I almost hit you," Mulder said. "I just wanted to make sure that you were all right." 

The woman lowered her gun. Her voice lowered as well, to a forced calm. "All right then. If you don't want anything, then get back in your truck and go, okay? Just get back in your . . . you have a *truck.*" Her voice shifted to astonishment. "How--how do you--no one's car has worked since . . . since. Except for the National Guard, and they--" 

"The National Guard?" asked Mulder. "They were here?"

"Yes, a few days after--" the woman halted, shifting her weight. For a moment they all eyed each other warily. "How is it that your truck still works?" the woman asked, curiosity fighting with suspicion.

"It's an older model, different electrical system, and it was in a place that was sort of shielded," answered Mulder. "The National Guard was here? What were they doing?"

The woman moved out of the glare of the headlights, closer to Mulder, lowering her arms. Scully tucked her weapon away, then saw that Maggie was still holding her lowered gun in shaking hands. She touched her mother's shoulder. "Mom, it's okay, you can put the gun down now."

"You're not from around here," the woman said. She was regarding Maggie speculatively, her voice skeptical but without as much fear this time. 

"We're passing through," said Mulder. "Trying to find friends. I didn't expect to see anyone on the road so late."

"I'm a doctor. I was helping deliver a baby and . . . " the woman stopped, eyeing Maggie again, and Scully could see her make the provisional decision to trust. "Claire. Claire Winslow," she said, tucking her gun away. "I'm a doctor here. Sorry about the gun, but medicine's been in short supply, and--"

"Mulder. Sorry about almost running you down. This is . . . Dana, and her mother Maggie."

Up close, Claire was older than Scully by about fifteen years, crow's feet in the corners of steady brown eyes, laugh lines carved deep around her mouth. And tired, plainly tired. In the aftermath of adrenaline, her hands were trembling. "All right," she said. "Dammit, I dropped my medical bag. Listen, if you keep following this road you're going to go straight through Heniston, and you shouldn't do that. We have sickness here."

Sickness. 

In the time it took her eyes to meet Mulder's, Scully was back in Dallas, telling Mulder that she did not know how a fireman had died. Oh God, this was really starting. 

"I'm a doctor," she said, and Claire's eyes focused on her. "A pathologist. I may be able to help you." Her voice stumbled. "I may know what's going on," she revised. "Their eyes . . . their eyes have a black film on them?" But Claire was looking at her with disappointment; Scully flushed with embarrassment at a look that said that Dana was not, clearly, going to be of much help. 

"Coughing," Claire said. "Coughing with lots of sputum. It happens fast - one day they start coughing, the next they have a high fever, breathlessness, chest pain, sweating . . . "

"That sounds like a pulmonary infection. Maybe pneumonia." Scully said, watching Claire measure her again, with more approval this time. "Only . . . "

"It's fast," agreed Claire. "And it's spreading fast."

Scully bit her lip. "No one had was sick before this started?"

"Not that I know of."

"How many people?"

"We have a population of 1500," said Claire grimly. "Of those, 100 are sick."

"But that . . . that's--" said Mulder in astonishment. 

"That's nearly ten percent," said Scully. 

"And the--the antibiotics aren't working," said Claire, her voice strangled. "People have started to die from this . . . "

Her mother's quiet voice broke in on Scully's shock. "Are you the only doctor here?" Her voice was sympathetic, interested, her hostess voice that she had always used to put guests at ease; it made both Scully and Claire look at her oddly and exhale. Scully had not expected an interruption from that quarter.

"No, I have a clinic with a gynecologist--Dr. Ruhl. The hospital's twenty miles away--people have always gone there if they're really bad. But we haven't . . . .we can't--" She made a small, helpless gesture with her hands. "And Steve--Dr. Ruhl--fell sick two days ago."

"We--" Scully bit her lip again. But they had time, they had several weeks before they were supposed to be at the rendezvous point to meet the Lone Gunmen, and . . . "We might be able to stay a few days, help you out.". . . and this was a chance to do something, to fight back.

"Scully," said Mulder, and she looked up to see anger and guilt in his expression. "We shouldn't--" He turned to Claire. "Look, we have friends who will be expecting us. We can't just--"

"We have time," Scully said, and her eyes met Mulder's and clashed with his. "We need to find out what this is," she told him urgently, pitching her voice lower. "This may not be an isolated thing."

"You're thinking it's not just Heniston?" interrupted Claire.

"We should find that out," said Scully, still holding Mulder's eyes. She saw the resignation in his eyes, and then he nodded.

"Yeah, we should," he said. "A few days."

"Don't say that if you don't mean it," Claire said sharply. "We need another doctor, but not if you're not going to be committed to it."

"We mean it," said Mulder. "Come on, we can give you a ride back to town, you can fill us in."

Claire sent a look at the truck, at them; Scully could almost read the platitudes about taking candy from strangers tumbling through Claire's head. Then Claire's eyes fell on Maggie, and she shrugged again and scrubbed her eyes. "God, I'm punch drunk," she murmured. "Just let me get my medical bag. We can go see Jeff Hicks--he's the mayor, he's been organizing things. He'll want to know about this."

It was odd to have Claire in the truck with them, Mulder shunted to the back. Claire was talking rapidly, relieved that someone was there to share her problems with but not quite trusting it. She held herself stiffly in the truck at first, giving out information a piece at a time, forcing Scully to prove herself by making the associations. Scully felt a small, fugitive flicker of amusement; Claire couldn't have known that this method of approaching problems was long familiar to Scully from seven years of working with Mulder. 

It was odd to enter a town instead of staying on the outskirts, fearful of being mobbed as they had been in Nashville. Odd, when they reached Jeff Hicks' office in City Hall, to talk to yet another person by the light of the kerosene lamp. Listening to Jeff's slow voice, with its shadow of practiced charisma, as he welcomed them to town, Scully felt as if the long truck ride had been nothing but a dream. Her mother was relaxing in the face of Jeff's charm, and Claire seemed more animated now, sketching out plans for what they could do tomorrow. In the dim light, her face still seemed tired.

And God . . . Claire must be tired; besides the sickness, the town was low on food and supplies, even though the National Guard had come by just a few days after the electromagnetic pulse, distributing blankets, water, nonperishable food, and medicines. Mulder had looked pained at that, and angry. "They knew," he muttered to Scully. "They knew enough to protect their own vehicles and people. They knew enough to be prepared. Damn them anyway."

"What was that?" Claire asked, but Mulder only shook his head. 

"What did they say was the cause of what happened?" he asked instead.

"They didn't say," Jeff answered. "They didn't know themselves. Poor kids."

"Poor kids?" asked Scully.

"They certainly hadn't signed up for this," said Jeff. "They were pretty quiet."

"What kinds of medicines did they distribute?" asked Scully.

Claire sighed. "Not a lot. All over-the-counter. Tylenol, Sudafed . . . they left two cases of Preparation H, for God's sakes. No antibiotics, though. No--at least they brought blankets, food, water. We needed all those things as well."

"Did they ask any questions? Did they question anyone, or take anyone away with them?" asked Mulder, and Scully shot him a quick glance to tell him to cool it, Claire was looking at him strangely. He ignored it, intent on getting an answer. 

"They only passed around some photos," Claire said.

"Photos?" Scully asked.

"It was just photos," said Jeff. He shrugged, rummaging through the stack of papers on his desk. In the dim light, his face looked puffy and old, even though he couldn't be past 50. "I think I've got them here somewhere, but they don't explain what happened--they're just people they were looking for, who they thought might . . . stir up trouble or something. No one in this town. Here we go." He pulled out a stack of about twenty papers, handing them to Mulder. "But they're not important."

"Oh, never mind, then," Mulder said, although he was already flipping through the stack of what looked like grainy black and white photocopies. "I don't suppose the National Guard brought something other than soup and canned beans?" He handed them to Scully, as if absent-mindedly.

And his thumb, brushing her hand, tapped her fingers three times, quickly, the Mulder signal from a hundred strategy meetings that the paper being passed around was important for some obscure reason that he would tell her about later. 

"Lots of canned vegetables," Claire was saying, as Scully glanced through the grainy photos that took up most of the page, the list of offenses against the government and possible aliases at the bottom, and wondered what Mulder had spotted. One of the photos was of a long-haired geek who looked familiar--had she met him in Las Vegas, was this what Mulder wanted her to see?

Her mother was saying something about the food stores in the truck, and she flipped to the next photo and went cold, even as her heart spiked.

The man's hand was rising, not yet touching the woman's back as they approached a doorway. The woman's face was turned up, as if listening intently to whatever the man was saying. The frame cut off below the knee but she knew which pair of heels went with the suit -- tall ones which brought the head of the woman in the picture closer to the man's chin.

Claire was asking Maggie if the same sickness was anywhere else.

Aliases for the man included George Hale; the woman might be Karen Hawkins. Karen, who in 1995 had checked into a seedy hotel room to let her drunk husband sleep it off, on a route that eventually led to New Mexico. 

She made her hands flip to the next picture. No one she recognized. Next. Next. How did they know about Karen Hawkins, she thought desperately, I paid in cash, I--. Next. Don't let this show on your face. Next. A smaller spike this time, at the sight of a short, untidy man who seemed to be grocery shopping; oddly enough, the thought that came to her mind was that yes, indeed, Frohike did wear those fingerless gloves everywhere. 

She tuned in again to find that the discussion had moved to finding them a place to stay. Jeff was suggesting the high school library. "It's close to the clinic, and one of Claire's volunteers is already staying in the high school. It would be hard, at this hour, to find someone to put you up..." he was saying. "It's not much to offer you, ma'am," he nodded here at Maggie, "being that you're kind enough to help out here, but--"

"I'm sure it's fine," said Maggie. 

"I tell you what, then, I'll walk you over there now. Claire, why don't I get our security guard to walk you home," Jeff was saying, as Scully dropped the stack of photos back on Jeff's desk, as he ushered Claire out

She turned to Mulder, whose eyes were dark with suppressed panic. 

"They didn't have our names," she said softly. "I don't know why they didn't have our names on them, but--"

"Probably because they thought that we'd have the sense God gave a *gnat* and use aliases. Overestimating us, of course--"

"Dana, what's going on? Mulder?"

Mulder shook his head and turned away, leaving her to answer her mother. "Mom, don't panic, because it's not very clear, but one of those photos is of Mulder and me."

Her mother's eyes went huge. 

"He's coming back," said Mulder.

They were all silent, listening to Jeff's shoes on the tile floor. 

Jeff showed them the school three blocks away, talking all the way and extracting a promise from Mulder to help move things with the truck, mentioning to Maggie that, if she felt the inclination, she might help out with some of the children whose parents were sick. He asked if she had any grandchildren of her own; Maggie's voice, hoarse and scared, made Scully's stomach twist. 

In the long hallways of the abandoned high school, Jeff told them of the girls' basketball team's win in Regionals last year and then fell silent, as if aware of the absurdity. The library itself was lit by starlight from the bank of windows along one wall. 

"It's not much," Jeff said. "I'm sorry about that. I tell you what, we can bring in cots for you tomorrow."

"We won't lack a bedtime story, at least," responded Mulder wryly. 

Jeff left them, giving them directions to come to his house for breakfast the next morning. They unloaded their bags off the truck wearily. 

"Wait," said Maggie as they did so. "Is it safe here? If they've been looking for you, it isn't safe here. They have--they have *pictures* of you. If Jeff looks at those again, or anybody who got a copy *looks* at them--"

But the man in the picture was clean-shaven, not scruffy, and the woman's hair could have been brown. She had been taller than Scully, too. She'd never thought her life would depend on Mulder's facial hair and a pair of high heels.

Mulder scrubbed his face. "They aren't clear. Besides, we're safer here, where they've already been. Even if someone recognizes us, how're they going to get in touch with the people who are looking for us?"

"What if . . . what if what happened with Dana, with the chip, happens again?" And she knew that her mother was on the verge of spilling the truth to Mulder, that Dana had been called more often than Mulder knew; her mother's mouth was almost quivering with the urge to hand this problem over to someone else. Scully should have been furious, but felt only resigned. 

"Well," said Mulder, "I've been thinking about that--I don't think another mass calling is going to happen."

"Why not?" she and her mother demanded in chorus.

"Whatever happened to draw people to Ruskin dam, happened to everyone in a specified geographical area. What purpose would that serve now? How would everyone get there? You've seen how much trouble it was to get where we are now--and we had a truck. I think . . . I think what happened to Scully the other day was a much more localized thing, maybe some sort of automatic signal. I just don't see how they would work the logistics of another full scale calling."

"But then she's not in danger," said Maggie in a wild relief. 

Mulder's voice was very gentle. "Well, yeah, Maggie, she is, if they were looking for us. But we're as safe here as we are on the road, I think."

Which wasn't safe at all, Scully thought, and remembered Mulder's reluctance to stop here.

"We're not safe from sickness," said Scully. "We don't know what the contagion is. Maybe the two of you should stay further out of town, stay away from--"

The look of their faces was identical, shocked and a little angry. "We stay together," Mulder said, and pulled his bag off the back of the truck, walking up the path to the school.

"Dana?" whispered her mother.

"These people are dying, Mom," she said. "If I can do something to help them, I have to try."

"Then we stay together," said Maggie. "It'll be . . . it'll be good, to be off the truck."

And even Scully, who was practiced in the art of denial, could not manage to hear anything in her mother's voice but despair.

**~+~+~**

November 17

Mulder had thought he wanted out of the truck as much as Maggie did, but not for this. Not to tend the dying, eighteen hours at a stretch. Not to dig graves, which was backbreaking labor without machinery to help. Not to watch his partner hold the hands of dozens of patients as they gasped out the ends of their lives. 

He knew, with the certainty that lodged itself in his gut near the end of most cases, that C.G.B. Spender was responsible for this. Without communications and transit, without power for the treatment plants and the sewer systems, sickness was inevitable. Spender must have known that. Had probably planned for it. And if Spender was responsible, then he himself was. For how many times had Mulder had the man under his gun, and turned away in bitter rectitude? 

He wanted to apologize to the sick and dying now filling the old Heniston High gymnasium for every hour wasted on mutants and sea monsters. Some cultures allowed public penance for moral failings: time in the stocks, shunning, fines. What was the appropriate penance for failing to kill a man and thus condemning untold numbers to death? He wanted to ask that of the old woman into whom he was ladling broth.

Instead he went looking for his partner. He checked for her at the library first, but she was not in her small, well-defined space in the non-fiction section. Scully had put her cot in the narrow aisle full of biographies and Elizabethan poetry. Unsleeping on his own cot in the early morning hours, Mulder would sometimes sit up to catch a glimpse of her between the shelves. 

Today Mulder found her outside the high school, slumped against the brick wall of the gymnasium. Above her head, in a swirl of urban-influenced graffiti on the red brick, was an exhortation to "keep blue," whatever that was. Unless it said "Ken True." His mind briefly considered an intersection of hip-hop culture, Santeria ritual, and alchemical symbology. He yanked it back to the now.

In the watery November sun, Scully was paler than usual. He hadn't realized before this past month how much of his image of Scully was based on her professional appearance. Without makeup, her hair hanging loose and unstyled, and shrouded in one of his sweatshirts because her fleece was soaking in a bleach solution after the last autopsy, she looked lost. She didn't look younger, in fact, but older, her cheeks pale under the spotting of freckles, and the skin of her eyelids frail as paper. They hadn't eaten or slept well in the past few weeks. It showed. 

She didn't open her eyes as he approached, but kept her position, her face upturned to the weak sun. It was cold, there had been a dusting of snow the night before -- had the weather changed on top of everything else? -- but the air was clean. You couldn't hear the coughing from out here.

Mulder dropped to the asphalt next to her, restraining a groan. Pushing 40, and he'd spent the past week burying the dead and shuttling barrels of water in the back of the pickup. He was too old for this shit.

We're all too old for this shit, he thought as he leaned back against the sun-warmed brick. The heat felt good on his abused muscles.

"Jesus, I'm stiff. I'd trade my hope of heaven for a massage." He said it lightly, watching her face.

As expected, her lips twitched. "That's a cheap offer, Mulder, considering you don't believe in heaven." A beat, then, "And no, you're not getting one on credit, either. I can barely move my fingers, and my forearms feel like Popeye's. An autopsy without power tools -- how did they ever manage?"

She stopped, the momentary amusement draining from her face.

He knew what her answer would be, but he asked anyway. 

"Anything?"

Scully shook her head.

Mulder sighed and nudged her right hand with the plastic water bottle he'd brought with him. She twisted off the top and lifted it to her lips without a glance at him. She did not, surprisingly, gag on the flavor, but her eyes flashed open as she swallowed.

"God! What is that, industrial solvent?"

"Present from Jeff's cousin Billy. Apparently his dad used to keep a still. He fired it up last week, this is the first batch. Guess it needs some work?"

She laughed. "Just a bit."

They stilled. Mulder watched a flock of crows on the other side of the football field. They were mobbing something, maybe an owl. Hard to tell from this distance. He wanted to watch Scully, but her eyes were open now, and he knew she hated to be stared at.

She took another swallow of the moonshine.

"Mulder, I don't know what to do. Neither Claire nor I can identify this. It behaves like tuberculosis on fast-forward, but doesn't respond to any of the standard treatments. It makes no sense . . . It's nothing like what we've seen before, not the retrovirus, not what you and I were both infected with. It's clearly a bacterium, and if it weren't for the unbelievable speed with which it's working, I would think it's just normal TB."

"But . . . ?"

"But it's not TB. Damn, I wish I had a better lab. Any lab, really. From what little I can tell, this bacterium is anomalous. I'm -- Mulder, I think it's been manufactured." Her voice dropped with the last words, as if she wished them unsaid.

Fuck. So it wasn't just the water and the crowded conditions after all.

The crows were still swirling around the trees across the field, but some of them were starting to settle down onto the maple trees. The maples' pollarded branches, thrust up against the pale sky, looked like de-fleshed long bones.

They sat there for a few minutes in silence, passing the moonshine back and forth. Pedestrians and horses passed along the road in front of the high school. One figure, head down in a dark blue coat, crossed the parking lot and entered the school through the main doors.

Maggie. Mulder watched her pass without drawing Scully's attention to her. Maggie hadn't adjusted well. She had had very little to say to either her daughter or Mulder since they had arrived in Heniston. She worked with the children in the day care center across from the high school, and spent a lot of time curled in her blankets. Mulder wondered if Maggie blamed him for all of this, even if she knew better.

He chewed on his lip, and tasted the blood from the chapped and cracked skin. "I think we should think about leaving."

Scully stiffened. "You can't be serious! These people are dying, Mulder. They need our help." 

As if he hadn't noticed. He'd helped dig three graves yesterday. One of them was for Juanita Allessandro, the seventeen-year-old star of the Heniston High girls' basketball team. He'd played Horse with her last week and she'd kicked his ass, much to Maggie and her daughter's amusement. 

"But we can't help them."

"We -- we can tend to them, and -- if I could get access to a real pharmacy --" He heard the desperate note in her voice.

"-- but we don't know what it is, how to treat it, or even how it's spread." His voice was harsher than he had intended -- it was difficult enough to discuss this, much less argue about it with Scully. 

He tried to catch her eyes. But she was looking at her hands, wrapped around the plastic bottle. What good are doctors' hands when the patients keep dying?

After a moment, he looked out again across the football field. It looked so peaceful now, like an ordinary Saturday in Heniston, Tennessee, it was hard to believe the truth.

The truth was that three people in ten were sick, dying of something that looked suspiciously like tuberculosis with a warp drive. Mulder pictured Scully, elbow deep in the bodies of the dead, and realized that if they didn't leave soon, it would only be a matter of time before one of them fell ill as well.

**~+~+~**

November 17, midnight

Judy Jenkins was dying. Scully pulled the blanket up over the old teacher's chest and took her hand for a moment before pushing herself to her feet. There was little she could do now; they'd been out of antibiotics for days, even if the drugs had made any difference. Scully crossed the old gymnasium and entered the coach's office, stepping carefully to avoid the piles of supplies in the dim light. They used a few precious Coleman lanterns in the gym, but the office was lit only by one short candle scrounged from Claire's china closet.

The gymnasium now housed the dying of Heniston, at least the ones that had overflowed Claire Winslow's small clinic. Fully half of the patients they had admitted here since Scully had arrived had died. She didn't want to think of what the figures might be like in other places, where the protection of isolation could be cancelled out by the lack of resources.

They had run out of cots, and the newest arrivals had to make do with pallets on the floor. At least they had plenty of blankets; Mulder was distributing them as evening drew on and the temperature in the gym dropped.

Scully sat down at the desk in the corner of the office to update her notes on the progression of the disease. Mulder picked up the last few blankets and brought them into the office to stack on the filing cabinet. After a moment the light in the room flickered. Scully looked up to see Mulder making animal shadows on the wall with his fingers. He had a hint of a smile on his face.

She was about to ask him to stop, so she could see to write, when he spoke. His voice was light, and pitched into a falsetto.

"Iiiiindeeeee, the torch is going out---"

Scully had to laugh. He looked so intent, twisting his fingers to cast the shadows of rabbits and wolves. Another unexpected skill in her multi-talented partner.

"At least Karen Allen wasn't a screamer, like that woman in the next movie."

"God, her, yeah. Screamed her head off for the entire thing. No use at all." Mulder chuckled and ran his finger through the candle flame. Shadows flickered around them and across his face. 

"Yeah. I always wondered what happened to her ---" Scully's voice trailed off. No need to wonder now. There was a good chance that nameless screaming actress was dead. 

Mulder stopped playing with the candle. The humor that had lightened his face for a moment was gone. Even to her sleep-deprived eyes, he looked worn. Mulder was the toughest person she knew, but this past month had taken the stuffing out of him, as her father used to say. His shoulders slumped under the stained t-shirt, and the beard had blurred the familiar angles of his face. He was still her partner, but there was an added layer of something there that unsettled her.

Suddenly he looked up at the window, his hand stilling on the coach's steel desk. She could nearly see the pinball lights flashing as his eyes narrowed. He'd thought of something.

"Did you ever learn about Lord Jeffrey Amherst in history class, Scully?"

She thought for a moment, staring absently into the candle, then looked back down at her notebook. "Nope. Never did."

"Lord Jeffrey was in charge of the British army during the French and Indian War. He has the dubious honor of having invented the concept of genocide by charity. He was the one who came up with the idea to distribute smallpox-infected blankets to the tribes in western Pennsylvania." Mulder didn't look at her to check her response, but kept his eyes locked on the office windows that looked out into the gym.

"Scully, when did the National Guard come through here with the supplies? And when did the first cases of TB show up?"

His face was in the shadows now -- everything was in the shadows, except the empty surface of her notepad, placed to capture the minimal light cast by the candle. Scully focused on the blank page, but her brain had wrapped itself around the thought, was turning and prodding at it.

She dropped the blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders against the cold.

"So you think it's possible." His voice was flat.

"Yes, I do, I --" 

Shit. She was not the only person in this building wrapped in a National Guard blanket.

She was halfway to the big double doors into the school lobby before Mulder caught up with her. "Scully, wait! Where are you going?"

"Mom--" His hand dropped away. She paused anyway, leaning her hip against the horizontal bar of the door latch. 

"Mulder, strip the beds. Lock all the blankets in the storage closet. I'll run some tests in the morning--" And then she was out the door, running down the dark hall. Her feet pounding down the tile in her sneakers, she skidded around the corner and nearly slammed into the library door. 

There was a light in the library. A single candle rested on top of the card catalog, throwing a paltry light over her mother, who was not asleep. Maggie sat on Mulder's cot in the M-Z fiction section, rather than her own behind the reference desk. She had upended Mulder's gym bag on the blanket and was digging through the jumble of clothes and supplies. There was a small pile of clothes on the gray carpet at her feet.

Scully crossed to her mother's cot and yanked the blanket off onto the floor. She did the same to her own cot. She turned to Mulder's bed but Maggie was still sitting on it. 

"Mom? What are you doing?"

"Dana." Maggie's voice was flat. 

Scully reached under Maggie and began to bundle up the scratchy olive blanket. Her skin crawled at the thought of the organisms that might be inhabiting it, infecting her even now. They'd been out of latex gloves for over a week; for the autopsies she'd been using heavy dishwashing gloves. Maggie shifted enough for her daughter to get the blanket off the bed, but didn't otherwise move. Her lap was full of Mulder's dirty underwear.

Looking down as she pulled the blanket off the bed, Scully realized that it was *her* underwear and clothing that lay in a pile on the floor.

"Mom? Are you all right?"

Maggie looked down at her hands, tangled in a pair of Mulder's boxers. She dropped them on the floor, picked up a filthy t-shirt and deposited it with the rest. Closing the gym bag, Maggie raised her eyes to her daughter.

"No, Dana, I'm not."

Scully tossed the last blanket into the middle of the floor and sat down next to her mother. She realized that she hadn't even spoken to her mother since the morning of the previous day, what with the sixteen new patients and two autopsies. They were wrapped in candlelight, silence, the musty smell of the books. The reflection of the candlelight turned the windows into dim mirrors. 

"Oh, Mom. I don't know what I can say." She leaned into her mother and wrapped an arm around her. It didn't seem to do any good. "Maybe you would have been safer at home."

Maggie shook her head. "Maybe not. I would have been alone."

Scully looked down at the pile of dirty clothes on the floor, poked at them with a sneaker toe.

"Mom, what are you doing? It's after midnight."

"Is it?" asked Maggie vaguely. "I couldn't sleep. I keep seeing that plane wreck....I thought I'd do some laundry."

"But Mom, you don't have to do Mulder's laundry. I'm sure he'd prefer you didn't."

Scully's lips twitched at the thought of Mulder's expression if he were to discover Maggie hand-washing his grimy briefs in a bucket. "Appalled" wouldn't even begin to cover it. Even after two weeks of unbearably close quarters in the old Chevy, Mulder had maintained a courteous distance from Maggie. It had allowed him to preserve a little of his own privacy under the guise of protecting Maggie's.

"I suppose not. It's just . . . I don't know. Something familiar." Maggie paused, then rocked sideways, her shoulder jostling Scully's. "And besides, Dana -- he reeks."

She would have thought only Mulder could make her laugh in the face of absolute terror. Then she caught her breath.

"Mom, Mulder -- we think the National Guard brought the TB. With the supplies."

"Oh, that's terrible. Those poor young men." It was automatic as breathing, Scully realized, that instinctive sympathy her mother exhibited in the worst circumstances.

"No, Mom. I mean, they brought it on purpose."

"Dana, no!" 

Scully couldn't bring herself to respond and simply shook her head. Who could believe this story? She watched the shock on Maggie's face fade slowly, to be replaced by outrage.

"But, this is the National Guard! They help people in floods and emergencies! They wouldn't do that!"

"They wouldn't shoot an unarmed man in the head and leave him by the side of the road, either, but we saw them do it."

"No. *No.* These are men like your brothers. Like your *father.* They signed up to serve, not to destroy. They wouldn't--"

"Maybe they didn't know. But whoever directed them knew."

Her mother's face registered fleeting acceptance of that, and then panic. "We've eaten food from those supplies. Water. I was going to use that soap to wash--"

"I think it's just the -- " Scully paused. What's if it wasn't just the blankets? What if they took Amherst one step further and decided to -- oh God -- "It might be just one thing, that would be easier for them. It's not -- I'll run some tests tomorrow."

"Tests," said Maggie dazedly, staring at the room.

"As soon as it's light," she said. "Oh, Mom, I'm sorry."

"Bill," Her mother said softly, and Scully thought for a moment that she was calling on the memory of her husband. "Oh, honey, what if Bill was called to duty before he got out of town? What if they're making him do something like this? And he wouldn't. He's a good man. He wouldn't, he wouldn't, he wouldn't."

Scully reached out to grasp her mother's hands. "Mom, don't --"

Her mother's eyes, suddenly full of tears, met hers. "It's not *fair,*" she said, a cry like those of the children she had been taking care of.

**~+~+~**

November 18

Mulder made a morning water run, delivering barrels to the clinic and a few other distribution centers. When he returned to the high school at noon, his pockets full of apples from the orchard on West Street, Scully was not in the gymnasium, the library, or the office. He finally asked Claire, who broke off the conversation she was having with one of the volunteers to say she'd seen Scully head upstairs with a couple of blankets. The second floor was where the biology labs were.

Mulder tossed an apple to Claire and the volunteer and headed for the stairs. The town owed a lot to the volunteers, he thought, as he ran his hand up the old wooden bannisters. Without their help, Claire would not have had the manpower to open the high school as a secondary clinic after her small facility was overloaded. And these people would have had nowhere to go.

Yeah -- they would have been dying in their homes, instead of in a high school gymnasium. How great was that?

As Claire had suggested, Scully was in the biology lab. At mid-day in November, the sun streamed in through the south-facing windows of the big room, glittering off the steel legs of school-issue chairs and high lab tables. Mulder blinked against the light as he came through the door, then located his partner. Scully was perched on one of the tall lab stools with her back to the door, the toes of her sneakers hooked behind the side rungs of the stool.

He knew she had always hated being surprised in the lab; Mulder gave a small cough as he wove his way through the room. She must have heard him, because she straightened with a groan from the microscope on the table top. As he came up behind her, she rolled her head to one side and pressed the heels of her hands into her lower back.

The lab table was covered with evidence of Scully's research: two blankets, one with the olive-drab wool delivered by the National Guard, and slides and containers of various fluids Mulder didn't try to identify. 

"I was wondering where you'd been hiding," he said.

Scully took a slide out of the microscope and laid it on the table. It clinked distinctly in the still, warm air of the lab.

"I told you I was going to run some tests. Where did you think I'd be?" Her voice was slurred with weariness.

"Have you even eaten since last night, Scully?"

She shook her head, picking up an eyedropper and depositing a droplet of something yellow on the surface of a new slide. She still hadn't turned to look at him. He fished out an apple and put it on the table, a safe distance from her supplies.

"We're onto something, aren't we?" They must be; why else would she still be here? 

Had she slept at all? Scully sagged on the stool, and pulled her hands down over her face. After a moment she sat up straighter, as if willing purpose and stamina into herself. Mulder considered the line of Scully's shoulders, the way they hunched together. Carefully, prepared for her to pull away, Mulder slid his hands over her shoulders. When she relaxed a notch, he began to knead the knot between her shoulder blades.

"I agree, Mulder, -- oh, thanks, yeah, right there -- the timing is suspicious." She shook her head. "But why would they do this? If they meant to spread disease, and I'm by no means convinced it's intentional, why bring any help? The National Guard brought food, water, medicines." 

He shrugged. "I don't know." He paused for a moment, spinning theories through his mind, but they dissolved before forming any connections. He dug his thumbs into a particularly difficult knot just above her bra-line, and she gave a soft grunt.

"What else do we know?"

Scully had dropped her head against her chest, and her voice was muffled. "Not much. The blankets do carry the bacteria -- it is the same as what I've identified in the sputum and the lungs of the dead. It looks very much like Mycobacterium tuberculosis, but also like some engineered bacteria I've seen in the past. There are anomalies I can't account for otherwise." 

"So we were right." For all the good it did them.

"Probably. It's hard to prove, though, Mulder. I mean, look at this!" Scully sat up, her body no longer moving with the rhythm of his hands pressing along her spine. She waved a hand disparagingly at the microscope. "I'm working in a high school biology lab. The textbooks are from the mid-80s, and the lab equipment may be even older. This isn't exactly state of the art -- "

"No, but it doesn't need to be. We don't have to convince an OPR hearing. We just have to be sure enough to go out there and tell people --"

"-- that their government is trying to kill them?" Scully swivelled her head to meet Mulder's eyes. Her eyes were red and weary, her hair pulled back in a cotton headband; she clearly hadn't slept. But on her face was the same skeptical look he knew from a hundred investigations: she'd found a hole in his logic. 

She continued with a familiar relentlessness. "But are they? I mean, if you can design a bacteria that can't be cured by any traditional means, and if you have a reliable method of distribution, why spread it in concert with food and other supplies? Why are only thirty percent of the population contracting this, and only half of those dying?"

He let his hands fall away. They seemed cold now, and he thrust them into his pockets. More mysteries. It didn't make any sense. Unless --

"I don't know, Scully. Maybe they don't want everyone to die at once?"

Scully blinked. In the instant that it took her eyelids to drop, and then rise again, he saw it all. Six billion bodies would create an ungodly mess. And six billion voracious baby aliens would turn on each other like sharks with chum in the water. 

"Oh my god." 

And their eyes met in appalled understanding.

**~+~+~**

November 21

That moment of realization in the lab filled her with a sort of angry despair, but it took another three days for her to admit the truth to herself: She could do nothing here. 

For the rest of her life, she would remember the uncomprehending look on Claire and Jeff's faces as Mulder tried to explain what they now believed about the source of the epidemic. If the truth hadn't been so terrifying, it would have been funny. Instead of laughing, though, she had had to explain the chain of logic they had followed, and tell these two something about how their government *really* worked. Eventually Claire had been convinced; Jeff had flatly refused to spread the word that the National Guard had done this on purpose. They had agreed to collect and destroy the blankets, but things had been strained with Jeff after that. He stopped inviting them all to dinner with his wife. Scully couldn't blame him; she'd knocked a hole in his concept of the universe. Maggie still talked to Jeff's wife Martha, Scully knew, but the two women would shut down whenever she came near, turning their conversation to the town children and their own childhoods. And Claire had kept her distance from Scully over the three days of unremitting work and death that had followed.

She had spent most of the night with a patient who died near dawn, and Claire sent her away around 10:00 a.m., telling her to get some sleep. Scully took a walk instead, however, wandering through the streets of Heniston, stopping at the end of town. If she walked a short distance further, she would find the new graves that had been dug. The woman who had died that morning would soon be there as well, accompanied by whatever meager ceremony her remaining family could summon for her. Some people did still hold elaborate burial ceremonies, calling on the minister or priest or rabbi to recite prayers over the grave.

Mulder didn't understand the importance of such rituals, even though he found them fascinating. Dead was dead. But growing up Catholic had shaped Scully's perceptions on this. Her faith was tenuous at best right now, but the framework created by years of Catholic school held. There had been one morning . . . .her mother had packed their lunches as they ate breakfast, Melissa cleaning up the orange juice that Charlie had spilled, and she herself had been gabbling off facts for the religion test she had that day. The seven corporal works of mercy, that Danny Kincaid had thought had something to do with the army ("but what do the generals do, Sister?") until it had been explained to him that the corporal works of mercy were the acts one did for the body, while the spiritual works of mercy were acts one did for the soul. 

Feed the hungry give drink to the thirsty clothe the naked visit the imprisoned shelter the homeless -- she had managed to rattle off the first five without any trouble, but the last two had given her trouble. "Bury the dead, stupid," Bill had said, from his far superior height. 

"Don't call your sister stupid," their mother had admonished, and added, "But he's right. Bury the dead is one, and take care of the sick is the last one, I think." Dana had asked when they did all these things--they had never visited the imprisoned--and her mother had explained that people did some of these works more than others. "It depends on what God puts in your path," her mother had said.

All she could do from here, all anyone could do, was bury the dead. If that was her path, she was choosing another.

She turned her back and walked back into town.

Mulder was sleeping when she reached the library, and she stood over him for a while, watching. An open book was lying, spine cracked, across his chest. Kafka's Metamorphosis. She smiled a little. That much, at least, hadn't changed; Mulder had always turned to stories of horror in times of stress, as if the fictional monsters he conjured up could chase away the existence of the real ones. Except here the monsters were human and bacterial . . . 

He had coughed yesterday, just a little cough, clearing his throat. Her heart had leapt and skittered; her hands had stalled. Now, her hand reached out of its own volition to touch his forehead, checking for signs of fever. 

His eyes snapped open. "I'm fine," he told her.

She moved her hand to his jaw for a moment before letting it drop. "I'm not used to seeing you with a beard," she said lightly, and continued in the same tone, "Kafka?"

"One night, after unsettling dreams . . . " he murmured. "It seemed appropriate, except we didn't even get dreams as warnings."

"Mulder--"

"Besides, I haven't read it for a long time--I sort of lost my sympathy for bug-men after Pinkus."

"Mulder, you were right."

"Of course I was. About what?"

"We're not doing anyone any good here. We should leave."

The quick sympathy in his eyes was too much; she rose and walked to stand by the window, gazing out at the parking lot. 

"Today?" he asked.

"I think that would be a good idea. All the--it looks like it might have run its course."

"Scully. You're not abandoning them. Claire's here, and there are a few others who have training as EMTs. Our presence here--we can do more good elsewhere."

"We keep running and running, Mulder, preserving ourselves and telling ourselves that we're preserving ourselves to fight. But when do we stop running? When do we find the ground that's solid enough to fight from?"

"We aren't going to find it here."

"No," she agreed, turning back to face him again. "But we need to find it soon. I can't keep running forever."

"Do you want to tell your mom?"

"Can you tell her?" Scully answered. "I need to talk to Claire." She watched Mulder's eyes shutter, a blink to hide something. She looked away, avoiding his eyes as she avoided this duty. She had asked Mulder to tell her mother about her cancer, too. 

She found Claire, not in the clinic or the gym, but in her office with its diplomas and books, sitting behind her desk with her eyes closed. 

"Claire," she said, and the other woman swiveled to look at her.

In another lifetime, this woman would have been poised and put-together, the kind of woman who always dressed stylishly. Striking. The crow's feet around her eyes were pronounced now, and her lips pale without makeup.

"Claire," she said again. "I need to tell--we--we're . . . "

"You're leaving," Claire said, and then, "You'll be taking the truck. Oh, hell."

"We're supposed to meet with friends. It's possible that they can put us in touch with some others who might know what's going on. We can't do anything here that anyone else can't do, and--"

"Don't apologize. You should leave while you still can."

They regarded each other for a moment in silence, which Scully broke. "I believe that we've stopped the spread of the contagion here, at least. But we need to find a way to stop it permanently. There has to be a way to stop this." 

"Dana, don't tell anyone you're leaving."

"I don't want to leave without--" 

"We need a truck. We need a doctor; we need people who are healthy to help with the sick and the children and the dead. And there are some people who are going to measure that need against the need you have to leave and--don't tell anyone you're leaving. Don't-don't tell Jeff."

Scully nodded, taking another step into the office. Claire looked exhausted to the point of illness herself, her eyes distant and dark. "We'll leave tonight, then. Were you all right, Claire?"

"Yes, fine. It was--most of my patients today weren't from sickness. One came in with bruises and a broken ulna. She's a repeat patient, comes in about once a month or so after her husband beats her up. Two women got in a fight over the last of the oranges at the grocery, and one of them had a broken nose. A man came in with an STD that he didn't want to tell his wife about. You'd think the end of the world would be dramatic, but it's all so small and sordid instead." 

Abruptly, she straightened in her seat and started to look through the piles of paper on her desk. "Which is why you don't need to feel guilty for leaving. You and Mulder and Maggie have done more for us, for strangers, than most of the people in this town have done for each other." She held out her findings to Scully, two thin, college-ruled, spiral notebooks. "Here. I don't know if this will be any good to you, but I've been keeping case notes since the beginning. They're not complete, but maybe they'll help you somewhere along the line."

"Thank you," Scully said, reaching out to accept them and flipping through them, watching Claire's handwriting become more sloppy, more hurried. "Claire, I am sorry."

"It's what you have to do."

"Yes," Scully agreed, but she knew that that was not what she was apologizing for. The sickness would have come, regardless of her presence, but Claire's eyes had lost some of the steadiness that they had had only two weeks ago. Her eyes had had a measure of despair, of grief since Scully had told her that this sickness had been engineered. Claire had an awareness of the capacity of human evil now, and Scully had carried that contagion herself.

**~+~+~**

November 23

They were two days out of Heniston when Maggie started coughing.

Mulder had decided to take a chance and use the interstate for once. It was exposed, and the abandoned cars were a hazard, but they made much better time than they would have on backroads.

Maggie was in her usual spot by the passenger window, Scully tucked up next to her. The temperature had dropped since sunset, and despite the heater, the truck was cold. Maggie had a sleeping bag draped over herself and her daughter. Mulder caught himself smiling at the image.

Maggie coughed once or twice, and he thought nothing of it. People cough.

Some time passed. He detoured around a five-car accident and a small herd of sheep. 

More coughing, harder this time. A little more liquid sounding. Scully stirred.

"Mom? You all right?"

Another cough. Maggie shifted in her seat, sitting more upright. "I'm okay, Dana."

"I don't know. That cough doesn't sound so good." He heard the care Scully took to keep her voice calm.

"It's just a cold." The Scully weakness: admit no weakness.

"Um-huh." Mulder heard a rustle, glanced sideways to see Scully lay the back of her hand against her mother's cheek. "Mom, you're warm."

"Dana --" 

Her daughter ignored her. "Mulder, let's find a place to pull off. I want to take Mom's temperature and get some fluids in her." 

He nodded, although he'd hoped to make another thirty miles before dawn. According to the information Byers had given them on that last day in DC, they were less than one hundred miles from the rendezvous point. 

There was a Motel 6 at the next exit from the highway; he would get off then. Just a cold. Maggie would take some aspirin, drink some juice, and they'd be on the road again tomorrow at sunset.

 

A little after dawn, he stuck his head through the connecting door to check on the two women. They'd developed a routine after a near-miss outside Asheville: either he or Scully was awake and armed at all times. Maggie was propped up on the bed, wrapped in layers of blankets. Scully was urging a cup of water on her, and a small handful of pills.

They were running short of medical supplies; Scully had dipped heavily into her own stash when they were in Heniston, before she'd realized none of the antibiotics were working at all.

"Everything okay?"

Scully nodded without looking at him. "We'll be all right. Get some sleep."

He left the door ajar. The sound of coughing woke him several times during the day. He lay on the stained mattress, wrapped in his own sleeping bag, and listened to Scully's voice until he drifted off again.

When Mulder awoke it was mid-afternoon by the light through the tatty curtains. Usually Scully woke him earlier than that, and he pulled a sweater on before edging the door open with his foot. 

The room was dim with the curtains drawn, and it took him a moment to locate her, slumped in the chair by the window. From that angle she could watch the parking lot and the rear door as well as the figure in the bed to her right.

He crossed to her and dropped to a crouch next to her chair. "How is she?"

She shook her head. "She has a fever."

"So we stay for a bit. The rendezvous can wait." If there would be anyone to meet them. He forced away the image of Frohike in black and white.

There was a silence. He picked up her hand where it was clenched on her knee. The skin was dry, her nails shorter than he'd seen them in the seven years he'd known her. 

"Christ, Scully ---" he choked, and fell silent again. Scully pulled away, crossing her arms and holding them close to her body. She squeezed her eyes shut for a long moment, then returned her gaze to the parking lot. Mulder saw tension ripple through her body, as if shudders of seismic intensity were being tightly controlled.

He wanted to weep, for Maggie, for Scully, for his own abandoned mother and the dying children in the Heniston gymnasium. He wanted to crawl into his partner's lap and have her soothe his fears. Instead he clung to her chair with one hand and wiped his eyes with the other.

The best he could do for either of them was crouch next to her unmoving form in a dark motel room, and listen to Maggie gasp for breath.

 

Things showed little signs of improving. After sunset Mulder slipped across the road to the shopping plaza. Scully had seen some activity during the day, but no vehicles moving. In this powerless world, everybody went to ground after dark.

WalMart's front doors were smashed, broken glass carpeting the sidewalk. He stepped carefully through and fumbled his way well inside before he switched on the tiny flashlight. Keeping the beam on the floor, he moved down the aisle, edging past fallen shelving, laundry baskets and children's toys towards the rear of the store. Towards the pharmacy.

He hadn't been the first one here, of course. He knew the strongest stuff would be gone: the narcotics would be the first to go. And if this illness was what they feared, antibiotics would be of no use. What Scully needed, though, might still be here. He ran over the names in his mind: isoniazid, rifampin, pyrazinamide, ethambutol. 

It took some time for him, fumbling throught the counters and stumbling over spilled pills, to scrounge a few dozen tablets of rifampin and ethambutol. After he wrapped the medication carefully in a plastic bag and tucked it into his jacket, he headed over to the first aid section. More bandages, antibiotic ointment, cough syrup. Several large bottles of aspirin and ibuprofen. He detoured through the camping supplies but there were no water filters left. No surprise there. He swept half a dozen random cans of food into his backpack on the way out. All things considered, it was a good haul. 

Maggie's fever was still running high when he returned. Scully was white with fatigue, but wouldn't let him relieve her until she'd fed her mother some of the aspirin and started her on the antitubercular drugs. 

The next two days passed in a haze. Mulder slept during the day, shift on and off with Scully. They pumped drugs and water into Maggie. They ate cold black beans, cold cream of mushroom soup, canned fruit. On the second day Mulder fired up the camp stove in the bathroom, but warm soup didn't seem to make any difference to Maggie. Scully got paler, her eyes sunk further into their sockets.

Maggie began to cough more often, each time more painfully than the last. Scully gave her carefully-rationed portions of the painkillers, and send Mulder back to WalMart to look for more. He found some codeine, which seemed to help the pain, but Maggie began to cough up deep green phlegm. Scully wiped her mouth and whispered to her, rubbing her back.

Mulder felt a little more hopeful on the third day. Maggie was more alert, sat up enough to eat her soup with her own hands, and joked weakly with Mulder about the kitchen facilities. Scully brightened perceptibly, and even laughed at one of his half-assed jokes. 

Half of those infected in Heniston had survived, after all.

Half died. He pushed the thought away. He had lost track of the days, but he knew that Thanksgiving was coming up soon, or had been already, and some small part of him was superstitious enough to consider that a good omen even though the rest of him jeered.

It was mid-afternoon, and raining. Scully was asleep on the other bed. Mulder was flipping through a battered paperback Scully had left on the nightstand. The Oxford setting wasn't enough to keep him involved in the tangled plot and pretentious characters. Instead, his attention was mostly on the street outside, where an occasional group of locals passed by. They'd been lucky so far; no one had even noticed they were there, much less in possession of a working automobile. When Maggie was back on her feet --

"Mulder." He barely caught it, her voice was so soft. 

He shifted his chair closer to the bed. "Maggie? How you feeling?"

"Not well, Fox."

Maggie had always looked younger than her age; it was only her hands that had given her away. But in the dim room, her hair four weeks past a scheduled color treatment and her face showing the strain of fighting the infection, she looked closer to eighty than sixty.

"Fox, I want to apologize." She spoke in a near-whisper, drawing shallow breaths.

"Mulder, Maggie, remember?" he said with a smile, and picked up a cup of water for her. "And you have nothing to apologize for." He held the cup to her lips and she took a sip before waving it away.

"I do -- I didn't believe you. And . . . " she glanced sideways but Scully was still asleep. "I never believed you were good for Dana. That it was . . . safe for you to be partners."

He nodded, offered her the water again. When she shook her head, he put the cup down on the nightstand. He picked up one of her hands, cradled it, comparing the loose texture of her skin and her careful nails, even after weeks on the road, to those of her daughter. 

"No, it wasn't safe. It was never safe." He looked out the crack in the curtains, where the street was obscured by the raindrops on the pane. No traffic. He offered Scully's mother a rueful smile and rubbed her hand. "But I -- I can't be sorry she's with me."

Maggie drew a shallow breath, and then choked, coughing harshly. The spasms wracked her tiny frame, and rattled the bed. He realized with a shock that she was sweating again. 

"Scully!" He didn't have to raise his voice; she was already awake. Scully crossed to her mother's side.

Mulder went to get more water from the jug in the corner. When he turned around, Scully was propping Maggie up, her head close to her mother's. There was blood on the fingers that Maggie took away from her mouth. Scully had her mouth at her mother's ear, whispering, her face tight with apprehension. Mulder put the cup on the night stand and went into the other room, leaving the two women together.

Maggie slipped into delirium without speaking again to Mulder. Scully spent most of the night clinging to her hand as Maggie mumbled commands and pleas to children, parents, and her husband. Near dawn, Maggie sat up suddenly. Her eyes were perfectly clear, but seeing something neither her daughter nor Mulder could identify.

"Charlie! Oh, god, Charlie! No!" 

"Mom, it's okay, Mom," Scully was murmuring, wiping Maggie's face with a damp cloth. 

Maggie shook her head, her eyes now focused on Scully. "No, it's not." She coughed, took another breath. "They have Charlie, Dana. You have to help him. He's your little brother." 

Mulder hadn't heard Maggie mention Charlie's name in all the years Mulder had known her. Hell, he'd nearly forgotten Scully had another brother. He'd only met him once. They'd had dinner together when they were in Idaho once on a case, and after Scully went to bed Charlie had pumped Mulder for information about the X-files. He'd liked the man far more than he had expected to.

"I will, Mom. Of course I will," Scully said. She swiveled her head to meet Mulder's eyes, and shook her head. He knew that look.

Delirium, he would have agreed. But Maggie had known when Scully was abducted. Maggie had believed him enough to get in the truck with them. He moved to the bedside, picked up Maggie's cold hand.

"What do you see, Maggie? What about Charlie?"

Margaret Scully never answered.

She died before dawn.

**~+~+~**

November 27

She could not bury her mother in these clothes that smelled of sweat and blood and death.

When she opened her mother's bag, Scully smelled the odor of the strong soap that she had used to clean their clothes in Heniston. She could still see her mother, finally finding something she could do, something familiar, her face lost and bewildered in the candlelight. The canvas of the knapsack was rough beneath her fingers, the corner near the end of the zipper starting to fray. There was a sweater on top, and she pulled that out, and rummaged further for a pair of pants, socks, underwear.

It felt wrong, to be searching her mother's things. The truck had not allowed them much space, and they had become possessive about their small privacies, their little corners of the world. She knew that her mother had brought along clothes and Ahab's shotgun; she did not know what else her mother had deemed valuable enough to bring to the end of the world.

Mainly, her mother had brought clothing, she found. Of course, she had probably thought that this would only be temporary--a weekend away, until Mulder was proven wrong or the government managed to fix whatever problem was brewing. Practical clothing, utilitarian and plain. The kind of clothes her mother had worn on Saturday mornings, when they had cleaned the house. Saturday afternoons had been theirs to do with as they wished, but only if they all pitched in to clean the house in the morning. 

A blue folder. She opened it to find what looked like legal documents: the deed to the house, the registration to the car, her mother's social security card and birth certificate, a recent bank statement. A will.

She unfolded that and scanned it, with fingers that shook slightly. It was dated shortly after her father had died; her mother's handwriting was smooth, a textbook illustration of cursive. In the event of her death, her assets would be divided equally between her four children William Melissa Dana Charles.

There was nothing of personal sentiment in the folder, no letters, even though Scully knew that her father had written her mother regularly. She and Melissa had been going through her mother's jewelry box once to find jewelry for a game of dress-up and had gotten sidetracked by a rubber-banded stack of letters. They had gotten half way through one--and how prosaic, how dull it had been, so that Melissa had snorted and said they had no romance in their souls--before her mother had caught them.

Her mother's wallet contained fifteen dollars, credit cards, and photographs. The six of them, taken when Dana had been in college. The most recent Christmas picture that Tara had sent of herself and Bill and Matthew, and one of Matthew alone. A picture of Charlie with his boys, hands resting on their shoulders. Other than those in the wallet, there were no pictures; there was no jewelry, no heirlooms except the pearl-beaded rosary that had belonged to Maggie's mother. Her mother wouldn't have wanted to lose anything important on the road, not if she thought she were going back home. She had brought practical things instead: a flashlight, toiletries, pear-scented hand lotion, her checkbook, band-aids, insect repellant, matches. And--Scully almost laughed--she had brought along those staples of the car trips of Scully's childhood--a book of crosswood puzzles and a deck of cards, pencils and pads of paper and the small travel set of Checkers. 

When had her mother realized that this wasn't just a road trip, that she wouldn't be returning home after all? And why hadn't Scully even noticed that moment?

The hesitant rap at the door made her start, the rosary that she was still holding falling through her fingers. "Scully?" Mulder's voice at the doorway was hesitant as well; he was averting his eyes from her mother's body. "I--it's--if you're ready . . . "

"I will be soon. I need to dress her."

"I'll--uh, I'll be waiting outside." But he lingered in the doorway for a moment instead. She caught the faint hint of gasoline: he had raided the gas station next door for fuel while he was gone. "Scully--" she knew that she would not like what he had to say by the line of his shoulders. "She didn't die alone. She had someone who loved her near her."

Whatever he saw in her face made him stride over, grasp her hands in his. "She knew that you loved her," he said.

She looked up at Mulder, felt his now calloused and unfamiliar hands touch hers; his face, hidden by the growing beard, was also unfamiliar, and she felt a massive sense of dislocation. How had she ended up here, with this man who knew next to nothing about her life before the X-Files? How had she, who had pitied Mulder for the unsure fate of his sister, for the unsure fate of his mother, ended up with no sister or mother at all?

"I'll be out in a moment," she said flatly, and pulled herself away. 

When he had gone, she stood over her mother's body. Oh, God, how was she going to be able to get back in the truck, leaving her mother in the cold ground? She had always gone back to work after a death, had always pushed on, but this was different. The truck would be full of reminders: the sudden space that meant that she would not have to ride shoulder to shoulder with Mulder, the map her mother had left folded on the dashboard, the strands of hair that were neither hers nor Mulder's. She avoided looking at her mother's face; that she would have to look at her body when undressing her was violation enough. Maggie's neck was cool. Even in so brief a time, all the warmth had left her body. 

She undid the first button on her mother's shirt. She did not cry.

**~+~+~**

November 27

Scully disappeared into the woods, moving in the direction of the parked truck. He didn't follow her.

Mulder looked around him, at the tangle of brush and trees hiding sinkholes and the nests of night creatures. Above him the sky was clear. He remembered vaguely that it had rained for the past three days, and he had had to warm the soup indoors, balancing the tiny camp stove on the narrow bathroom counter. Now there were stars.

The faint light was enough to show him the outlines of Maggie's grave, a rough rectangle in the matted meadow grass. Mulder moved forward a few places and squatted down next to it, his knees creaking. The blisters on his hands stung when he pulled them over his face.

After a moment, looking down, then up at the sky, he settled uncomfortably onto his knees, sitting on his heels. The big soles of his boots cut into his thighs, but he didn't move for a long while. 

The air was cool, but milder than it had been when they left Heniston. A cricket sounded, perhaps its last performance before disappearing for the winter. Mulder tilted his head back and stared up at the night sky. Without the light pollution of mini malls, street lights, and high school sports fields, the stars were many, and brighter than he'd seen them since he had chased a rumor to a mountain in the Yukon.

A meteor passed overhead.

He was not going to weep. He didn't have the right.

After several minutes, he wiped his face, then leaned forward, and pressed his splayed hands hard into the soft dirt of Maggie Scully's grave.

"I promise."

Mulder pushed himself awkwardly to his feet and left the clearing. 

The sound of his body crunching through the undergrowth faded slowly. The stars lit the gravesite, and the imprint of two large hands in the disturbed earth.

**Author's Note:**

> And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,   
> That appeared once, still wet   
> As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,   
> And, touched, coddled, began to live   
> In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,   
> Tribes on the march, planets in motion.   
> "We are," they said, even as their pages   
> Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame   
> Licked away their letters. So much more durable   
> Than we are, whose frail warmth   
> Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.   
> I imagine the earth when I am no more:   
> Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,   
> Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.   
> Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,   
> Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights. 
> 
> \- Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley 1986.
> 
>  
> 
> Notes.
> 
> cofax: I have to thank Maria, Marasmus, and Fialka for terrific advice and support on this project, which kind of got out of hand from such a little 11K start. Between them, they may have cured me of my semi-colon addiction. Also Magdeleine, for evil plotting and general support. And Wartime Auxiliary member the incomparable wen, for splendiferous art. I also have to thank all the stalk- -- I mean, the supportive folks who kept reminding us to get on with it, already. Yes, Jean and Sarah, I'm looking at you. Maggie, the grammar goddess, for signing off on it all. And, of course, Virginia, which is my intercontinental cyber-hometown.
> 
> Maria: I swear to God, I never mentioned the word semicolon; given my own fondness for them, it would have been hypocritical. (Reading John Irving at an impressionable age does this to a girl.) A big "me too" to the thanks to the Wartime Collective, wen, Maggie, and our stalkers (Stephanie Leslie Jo this means you too). And thanks and margaritas to cofax, who had to put up with my spells of procrastination, writer's block, grief, and laziness with patience and fortitude. 
> 
> cofax: mmmm, margaritas. A few last notes: Yes, we know it's Kate Capshaw. And that "Gaudy Night" is a wonderful novel.


End file.
